The Jesuit's Tale (1955)
By Tsi-an Hsia (夏濟安)
Father Friedrich Kolzberg, S.J., was an even bigger man than I had expected. I had made an appointment with him, and arriving at his door, after the servant, a devout-looking, middle-aged man, had let me through the nice little garden, I found him waiting for me. The sliding door was open and he was standing on the entrance platform inside the doorway, his tall black-robed figure stooping under the low ceiling of the toy-like house. Such a big man struck me, indeed, as out of place among the flimsy paper doors, the quaint little screen made out of a cross-section of the root of an old tree, the tiny carvings on the top of the wall in the forms of little birds perched on slender trees or in flight among flowers. But he was all smiles: his pale blue eyes shining out from the depths formed by thick gray eyebrows and myriads of wrinkles and his mouth, covered by bushy beard, open like a cavern—these all seemed eager to offer me the welcome.
“So you are the young man introduced by Professor Chang? Please come in.”
“Father Kolzberg? I am very glad to meet you,” I said in English.
“Please don’t call me that foreign name. I am simply Ko Fei Li. Or if you like, call me Ko Shen-fu神父.* And I would appreciate it if you would speak your own language.” He continued in Chinese. I was embarrassed when he seemed not to notice the hand I held out for him to grasp. Perhaps he had become unused to that form of Western civility, after, as I had learned, his fifty years in China. I could only draw my hand back and began to apply it to my shoes.
“Oh don’t bother about the slippers. Just walk in. Up here.”
His voice was very thin; it sounded so incongruous with his imposing size and his large head that I felt as if I were hearing the mouse's squeak when I saw the lion open his mouth. But it was gratifying to hear Chinese being spoken so well by a foreigner, with so little studied grace and not a touch of the linguist's affectation. He spoke the Northern dialect, probably the dialect of S— County in H— Province where he had spent the best part of his life and where, as the newspapers said, his name as a missionary, educator, medical doctor, philanthropist, and archeologist would "stand forever in the people's memory in spite of the Communists' efforts to obliterate or besmear it." But if I could still catch a trace of foreign accent in it, it was perhaps because of my prejudices: I simply could not bring myself to believe that a man with such strongly Western looks—with his high thin nose and horse-like nostrils, sunken eyes, ashen skin, and powerful cheek-bones—could speak perfect Chinese. The only thing Chinese about him, except for his language and the name he was known by in the Chinese press, seemed to be his blue silk slippers which were gleaming with the white peonies embroidered on them; but their prettiness, quaintness, and casualness again struck me as in discord with the long black cassock covering his whole big frame. More slippers, fine straw ones, were laid in pairs near his feet. I thought it would be better to follow his example than to obey his instructions. Moreover, there was the bench, as in some Japanese- style houses, for me to sit down and take off my shoes before I should get to the main floor.
"Why must you all keep the Japanese custom when the Japanese are no more the rulers of the island?"
"But the house, I believe, was built by the Japanese. Its matted floor was not meant to be soiled by the dust of the street."
"You are right. It is perhaps a good exercise too to bend one's body so many times a day in lacing and unlacing the shoes. But it is a punishment to an old man."
I could imagine the kind of punishment he meant, seeing with what rusty clumsiness he moved as he shuffled and showed me the way in.
"Take that seat, please." He pointed to the chair farther from the door—customarily, in China, the seat for the guest—while he himself sat down, with a thud, on the one next to mine. We were separated by a little rattan table.
"I wonder how the Japanese could squat on the floor all day long without cramping their legs. I am very happy to have these chairs here—all of them, together with this house, are gifts from my dear Chinese friends. The Chinese here are very nice to me, in spite of my crimes."
"Your crimes?"
"Didn't you read about that in the newspapers? Didn't you learn that I had been expelled from the Chinese mainland as an enemy of the Chinese people? Didn't you know that I had been pointed out as a narcotic trader, a counterfeiter, a usurer..."
"But those are the Communist lies! No one would believe a word of it—not even the Communists themselves."
"Lies perhaps. But I signed the confession."
"The Communists could extort any kind of 'confession' from anybody. Even a venerable personage of your Church, Cardinal Mindzenty of Hungary, was loaded down with fantastic charges before he was finally disposed of. Such people are only victims of Communist tyranny and cynicism."
"You are very kind, young man. But will your people forgive me when I go back to the mainland? Shall I have the face to meet my flock again if they have found out that the priest they trusted, the beloved Ko Shen-fu, was, upon his own word, nothing but a fiend, a beast dressed in a cassock, a hypocrite now exposed? Even if they should forgive me—for I can say the Chinese people are wonderfully generous—can I forgive myself? And will God forgive me? However fictitious my other 'crimes' may be, I have committed one real crime: that is, I have lent my name to the Communist propaganda. I have become a ch'ang倀, the ghost of a man who, after having been eaten by the tiger, is leading the beast to devour his fellow human beings. By signing that document—I cannot even remember how it looked, whether I used a steel pen or a Chinese brush, I used only whatever stuff they thrust in my hand—I say, by signing that document, I have lent ammunition to the forces of evil. They are trying to uproot faith from your people and I have helped them in their unholy work. It is perhaps in consideration of the tremendous service I have rendered them that they have spared my life. But even death would not acquit a sinner."
I had not been prepared for such a display of emotion. I had read about the trials and tortures he had undergone, his release after he had signed a ridiculous confession, and finally his expulsion. Neither the newspapers here nor those in Hongkong, where he had stayed a few weeks before he came to Formosa, had attached any importance to that document except that it would serve as another instance of the Soviet farce of "justice." But his vehemence in bringing down the accusation upon himself at this moment made it very hard for me to put in a word of comfort. I had come here to hear him talk about his experience on the mainland, and now he was right in the painful subject without even any trouble on my part in broaching it. A man with his learning and his experiences might talk about almost anything and it would still be interesting. But where I had expected reminiscences and anecdotes that would come in trickles and streams, I was hearing now the distant roars of a cataract which, unless checked in time, would drown me in a flood of lamentations and religious discourse and thus defeat the purpose of my interview. I would rather have the lights in his vast storehouse turned on gradually, one at a time, so that I might have an unhurried look at the wealth he had hoarded; but such a sudden blaze of passion, of religious fervor and sincerity, dazzled and blinded me. I was particularly alarmed at his aspect at the moment—his fingers and eyebrows were trembling, beads of perspiration were bursting forth on his forehead, and his eyes had sunken so deep that I could not tell whether they were still searching his own conscience or looking upward at his God for grace and forgiveness, whether they were reviewing the past or staring at a point in the distant future where, despite his age, he was contemplating meeting again "his flock" on the Chinese mainland. His language was still the dialect of H— Province, but now that his foreign accent was emphasized by his emotional tone, it sounded pathetic, and his voice was that of a worn-out pipe. Perhaps it was inhuman to get the old man so excited; I tried to revert to the lighter subjects with which our conversation had begun.
"No one would ever take the Communist propaganda seriously. But the Chinese people will always be grateful for the good deeds you have done for us. This nice little house, if it is a gift as you have said, is concrete evidence, even if in a small way, of our gratitude."
"Oh, yes. The house is nice. But one always feels something is missing here," he said absent-mindedly. Then, wiping his brow with a white handkerchief, he added, "I am sorry. You came here on such a warm day and I had nothing to entertain you. Would you like tea or beer? I would rather recommend beer—your Taiwan beer is quite good. You know, this is a connoisseur's opinion." A gleam of a smile had come back to his eyes.
Before the servant brought in the drink, my eyes were attracted by the picture and the couplet hanging in the niche. Both were works of Chinese art, mounted on scrolls and hung vertically. The lady in the picture might easily have been mistaken for Kwan Yin, the so-called Goddess of Mercy, if she had not borne the title Holy Mother. Yes, she was holding a baby in her arms, but her delicate slanting eyebrows, her phoenix-like eyes, her tender oval face, her white hood painted in flying lines, her half-revealed raven-black curls of hair (part of a coiffure modeled, no doubt, after the headdress of a Chinese empress a thousand years ago), her blue robe with an infinite number of folds and frills, weightless and airy, mingling most gracefully with the white clouds that filled the background and hid the feet-all these represented a serenity, a feminine beauty or a divinity completely Chinese. The couplet was written by Mr. Y—, elder statesman and renowned calligrapher and poet, but now also a refugee on this island. It read:
To the Reverend Mr. Fei Li, art critic and friend of China:
Leaving the mainland, painful to see the devil usurp our home;
From this blessed island, let us actively prepare our new crusade!
Very poor verse, I should say. But it at least reflected the mood of the time when poets became slogan-writers and one could hear the rattle of the sword as angry strokes like this were hacked out by a calligrapher who, I believe, must have been as old as the "art critic and friend of China" to whom the piece of writing was dedicated.
The room as a whole looked little different from the parlors of the Chinese homes in Formosa. It was simply furnished so it looked bright and more spacious than it really was; but the mats were new: one could almost smell the fresh straw. The sliding windows in the front were wide open, and the little garden looked very green and cool and quiet within the wide wooden frame. The morning sunshine, half of its heat filtered out by the dense foliage of the sub-tropical trees and shrubs, accentuated the beauty of the scene with its playful golden touches that would light up a yellow plantain車前草 flower or a bunch of red or purple rhododendron杜鵑花 flowers. The garden, indeed, was so overflowing with greenness that splashes of it seemed to have dropped inside and soaked deep into the floor of the porch, and they added a new luster to the seasoned tawny juniper wood with which the floor was paved. The shade inside was further deepened by the tall trees outside the mossy walls; the alley was quiet too. Not a sound could be heard; the servant, who came in in slippers, did not make any noise when he put down the bottles of beer and glasses with ice. The old man, meanwhile, was also gazing at the view before us, his profile as hard as that of a statue hewn out of a rock, but the veins were standing out at his temple and they looked gnarled, tense, and swollen, as if a sort of blue lava rather than blood were running in them. I was afraid of an eruption.
"Well," I said, as the silence was broken by the little pop with which the servant had opened the bottle. Now the beer was bubbling into the glass, melting the ice inside. "Well, this is really a lovely place, perfect as a residence for a religious man like you. Especially after the nightmare you lived through during the past few months."
"Do you see that something is missing here?" He stared at me as he held up the foaming glass.
"We who are from the mainland will of course always miss the mainland."
"What I miss is greatness. Often I will be sitting here, looking out at the garden. What do I see? Trees, flowers, grass, sunshine and shadows—just as they are now—everything within these twenty feet. Lovely, you may say. But somehow I feel I am constricted, narrowed, shut in. I miss the grand view, the vast expanse of land, the billows and waves in the sorghum高粱 fields, the columns of wild geese flying across the rosy sunset, the broad sky meeting the broad earth in a happy communion."
"Then you would prefer to live in the country? The countryside in Formosa is lovely too."
"But it would still be different—different," he sighed.
Beer in hand, I was much impressed with the strange homesickness felt by a foreigner for the Chinese mainland. But then he continued: "The windows of my house in my parish looked out on a much wider space. Life in its entirety was present before my eyes. But what do I see here? Nothing but vegetation—or sometimes an insect: a spider, a butterfly, or a drone."
"Ko Shen-fu," I said (that was the first time I called him by his Chinese title), "did you miss your own country so badly when you first came to China?"
"That was different," he smiled again. "I was young then and I was active. When one is active, one does not think so much. Moreover, I had not spent fifty years in my humble country when I came to your noble country. And thirdly, your noble country possessed the charm that would make one forget one's own country—if you do not take this remark as flattery."
"That charm must have had something to do with the view from the windows of your house in S— County?"
"Exactly. By the way, do you believe in the transmigration of souls?"
That question was odd. "Personally I doubt it. At least it is taught by neither Confucius nor Jesus Christ. But I can't see why you ask such a question."
"For I have now seen the reason. When I signed that infamous document, I was under the spell of the Chinese belief—or is it Indian?—of the transmigration of souls. I might have held out. Do you think a man with such a physique," (he was trying to bend his arm to show me his muscles when he said that, but he soon gave it up with a smile), "—but I was a much stronger man when they took me away—and a man at my age should be afraid of torture or death? But I was haunted when I was being interrogated. I was haunted, I tell you."
I put down my glass. Here was something I had not found in the stories about him in the newspapers. Here was perhaps the real story.
"But that will be a long story to tell. Let me open another bottle of beer." His face flushed but he was apparently in better spirits now. He even put his muscle to a successful test by opening the bottle himself, and filled two glasses.
"Do you know that the young men of your country sometimes all look the same to a foreigner—a foreigner who may have stayed in China for fifty years like myself? I mean they seem to have the same kind of features, the same cast of countenance, the same expressionless, mysterious look that may denote stupidity or racial wisdom or cunning or benevolence or patience or ruthlessness or any of those virtues and vices that, rightly or wrongly, have been attributed to you as a nation. I will not, of course, include you. You are a so-called intellectual, a ‘mental worker勞心者’ as Mencius put it, not a ‘physical worker.’ You with your plastic-rimmed glasses and your cynical smiles and shrugs, are, to me, not a perfect Chinese. You belong, rather, to the Universal Republic of Intellectuals. (You see, I am flattering you again. Will you drink your beer off so as to acknowledge my compliment?) But the majority of the young men of your country are not like you. They puzzle me because they are Chinese. And they are also the masses—the mob.”
“May I ask what is the difference between the masses or the mob and—a flock?”
“A very clever question. Will you be satisfied if I say that a flock is the masses converted, or the masses saved? But I am really not the man to answer your question. For after such a number from my own flock (oh, those rebellious goats!) have stood up and denounced me, I must say frankly that I know as little about my flock as about the masses. The masses are so fickle, so silent, so unresponsive, that I have never been sure of their conversion. One day you may think you have won them over, and the next day you will find they have again slipped out of your fold and that they are grazing in the happy pasture of pagan freedom. Of course, I may still win them back. But how hard my work would be if I should find them penned up in my enemy’s enclosure, and that they are happy there, happy to live with the butcher and the devil! The masses can be won over, but perhaps not by me. It is not that I am old. It is because I am an intellectual like you—I am not one of them. And moreover, in my particular case, I am a foreigner. I can never become a Chinese, in spite of all my amiability and my diligent studies in your culture and civilization. Even you, for instance, are not treating me as a Chinese. You are treating me simply as a fellow member of your Republic of Intellectuals. Am I right?”
“Now the Communists I had to deal with were people not like you. They were the mob. (You may define the mob as the masses possessed by the devil and moved into action.) And the mob may move in a large force, such as the shouting crowds at the public trial; it may move as a dozen scurrying tight-lipped guardsmen like those who came to take me away; or it may appear as a couple of 'people's police' who were always ready, with their big powerful hands, to shake me awake if I should show the least sign of nodding or closing my drowsy eyelids during the long hours of interrogation before I was submitted to the public trial; or it may sit there in the form of a single person, the interrogator. Of course there was more than one interrogator, but they came in rotation: every two hours—or three hours or four hours, I cannot remember the exact length of time—the interrogator would retire, defeated perhaps, for I had been stubborn, but he would smile a sinister smile when he stood up and leave the chair and the prisoner to his successor, as if he were still sure of success. The new man would be of the same build, in the same drab uniform, with the same expressionless face and unruffled voice, so that you could not even get mad at the same old silly questions, the same fantastic charges which you believed you had already satisfactorily answered or denied. That man would again be foiled in his attempts to intimidate or wheedle me into accepting the charges. He would only succeed in boring me—oh I was terribly bored—but perhaps the man himself was bored too. So another man would come, but the same epitome of the mob, not loud or shrill like the mob I was to encounter later during the public trial, but a mob cool with calculated determination, a mob compressed into a Marx-Lenin-Stalin uniform, seated in the chair like a mandarin and armed with dialectic. I was so confused by the identity of the interrogators sitting before me that I soon lost my sense of discrimination. I cannot remember whether I even noticed when one of them, the fifth one perhaps, rerogators, seemed to be only a head, a voice, a series of repeated questions, a will to persecute, a simplified image of the mob, a symbol of power wielded with ruthless cunning, a mouthpiece of the new leadership which would not allow its authority to be challenged, not even by God and His priest. To such a head and voice, my answer had been a firm and complete denial. I had been indignant—I believe I had stamped my feet—but my voice had become weaker and weaker until I could not even gasp out an audible semblance of the monosyllabic sound that would say 'No' to the false charges which were beginning to weigh heavily upon my shoulders. I felt I might collapse at any moment to the ground. But the husky men at my elbow would help me up and revive my spirits by a slap on my face or a kick in my thigh. Such a stroke was welcome to me, for it provided stimulus to my muscles and saved them from paralysis. My trousers had become wet and dry several times but neither I myself nor the interrogator seemed to have noticed the stink. Sometimes a bowl of cold water would be thrown into my face and the drops that wet my lips seemed to be the most delicious drink I have ever tasted in my life—with all respect to your Taiwan beer. Then I would shake my head. And I continued to shake my head when I could not wag my tongue. I would not take the pen or pencil which the men by my side tried to thrust into my hand. You see I was still stubborn.
"It was, I believe, when I stood thus confusedly facing the seventh interrogator that I felt I was haunted. I began to see double—or even triple. I saw not only one ghost; I saw two ghosts." He crossed himself. I had just swallowed a lump of unmelted ice, so coldness had reached the pit of my stomach. I set down my glass and was speechless. The Madonna in Chinese dress was now radiant with a splendor of intellectual beauty which I had not noticed when I first looked at her and the white peonies牡丹 on the old man's slippers were shimmering beautifully as the morning lengthened into day.
II
"The new interrogator came in with a lamp," Father Ko resumed. "He might have been one of the old interrogators, now back from his conference or other official duties. But I did not care who he was or how he looked. My head was very heavy at that time. Except that I was still shaking it in defiance, it really served no other function of a head. I had stopped thinking, and the only sense perceptions I had were the sounds which I somehow knew to be questions hurled at me but which I had ceaselessly tried to shake off. My eyes had become very dim, but why should that have troubled me? So long as I could continue to shake my head, so long as I could hold my fist tight, I would not have minded if I had lost my sight. You would perhaps now have a different story if God had indeed in His mercy struck me blind. For a blind man sees no distractions; with only his inner light to guide his steps, it is easier for him to pursue the right path. Darkness is no doubt suffocating and threatens with unseen danger, but illusory light can be disastrous; you will see how I was confounded by the lamp brought in by the Communist.
“As I have said, I was not bothered about the new interrogator. It was his lamp that roused me and made me see. I began to see how dark it had become. So night had fallen, the long day had passed, and happily I still had my sight unimpaired. I cannot remember if I heaved a sigh of relief. But before I had had time to congratulate myself upon the wonderful recovery of the lucidity of my mind, I was appalled by the phantasmagoric world which the flickering light of the lamp was now revealing to me. It was the first time I had ever looked round to see where I was. My attention had been too much engrossed in the progress of the battle itself to take much notice of the battleground the enemy had chosen. But the terrain was definitely against me, it would eventually spell my ruin. The court, if you can call that place a court, was held in a section of the main hall of the Jade Emperor's玉皇大帝 Temple, but the Communists, probably in a hurry to convert the temple into their local headquarters, had not removed the old idols. So now the attendants of the Jade Emperor were rising up out of the darkness in all their ugliness, the first one glowering, the next one sneering, some baring their sharp teeth, some raising a sword or a mace, and a red-visaged demon was pointing his very, very long finger at my face. Above these terrible images, I could see the huge portraits of the Communist leaders, whose chubby smiling faces looked now as benign as those of angels in Heaven. The Communist slogans, fresh and scarlet, were staring at me from the wall and at once my ears were filled with the cries, 'Exterminate the landlords,' and 'Get rid of the imperialists.' The place, which had been lost to me in my confusion and excitement even before the gathering of the dusk, looked vast and unfathomable in its dimness, floating with shadows and illuminated by a lamp that heightened rather than dispelled the mystery. I was so fascinated by the sights around me that for a moment I almost forgot about the interrogation. My eyes were opened now, but opened only to a world of unreality where my mission on earth, my dubious fight with the Communists all became very remote and I felt more like a child in a nightmare than a prisoner under persecution.
"Then I saw the old Taoist votive tablet hung on the pillar. Its gilt inscription struck me as if it were written in fire when the lamp came so close to it. It contained nothing more than an ancient Chinese proverb, but those few familiar characters, read under such circumstances and in such a light, became a sort of revelation to me. They afforded a reason, a theological interpretation to everything around me. In one flash I saw I was lost. At once the world was in chaos, my will broken, my strength gone, my faith shattered.
"For thus it was written: 'The Heaven covers everything like a net; its meshes may be wide, but from it there is no escape(天網恢恢，疏而不漏).' To a man already troubled with the feeling that he was caught in a net, this came not only as a timely reminder, but also shocked him into a new realization of his situation, that the net was being tightened by a supernatural force. And that force was identified with Heaven.
"Perhaps ever since the People's Liberation Army marched into my parish I had been prepared for such an ordeal. But distressing as the prospect had seemed at that time I had seen no cause for alarm. If I had derived comfort from the hope that, with Providential intervention, I might still regain freedom and swim in His blessings, my faith had at least not been affected by fear. I had even secretly welcomed the idea of dying at the hand of the Communists, which, as you can see, would not have been an unworthy end to my long life as a missionary and a Christian. I had seen the battle clearly defined: on the one side stood the Communist persecutors, wicked, proud, brutal, cunning, who represented Hell; opposing them were the persecuted, the innocent, the humble, the meek, the servants of Heaven, the believers who might suffer from the necessity of lying prostrate before the secular power but who would be happy and strong in their faith, dying with a hymn on their lips. The outcome of such a battle had not been hard to foresee. For I was not afraid of death, and the Devil had seemed to be a bully that could be repulsed with little difficulty by a simple heart bolstered by the stubbornness of one's character. If the battle between good and evil, the mystery of cosmic forces in perpetual fight, could be reduced to such simple terms, then even a stupid old man like me might have snapped his fingers at the Tempter and said in triumph, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’ But Satan’s greatest strength, as is attested by the Scriptures and the Fathers of our Church, lies in his very subtlety: you might think he is behind you when he is right before you. In my naive optimism I had evidently underestimated the Devil. He is no doubt wicked, proud, brutal and cunning; but he is more than that: he is also multiform and unpredictable; he adapts himself to every situation; he can assume an appearance of respectability or even sanctity; he can usurp the name of Heaven.
“So the shining characters on the tablet, which I now can see was nothing but a peep into Hell, a temptation that would lead me to my doom, was accepted by me at that time as a revelation of divine truth or divine will. I thought I was seeing Jehovah’s fiery fingers writing down my damnation. The divine guidance I had secretly prayed for seemed to have come at last. But it only said that my case was hopeless, that the only thing for me to do was to surrender myself to the supernatural force which had caught me as if in a net. Little did I think what a profanity of thought I was then committing in accepting the analogy of Heaven, which I had always believed to be merciful, forgiving, and loving, to a mechanical device, something as subtle and heartless as a net. But seeing the hand of God was against me, I was ready to give up. Where would be the glory of death and where indeed could I escape? Who was I but an old fish who had already lived his full span of three score and ten and who was now lifted out of water, gasping and foaming, to face the mysterious fisherman whose net was said to be cast over every corner of the earth?
“So I was actually defeated by the combined strength of the Chinese pagan religion and the Communist Party. It does not mean, however, that the Communist Party, unaided, would have failed to get what they wanted from me. For I always suspect that the Devil is at work in everything the Communists have been doing. A movement that has brought about so much misery and loss of reason among mankind must have, so it seems to a Christian like me, its spiritual, as well as its political and economical reasons. Now I can say, after my own painful experience, that in dealing with the Devil, you will never be sure how you will meet him or what stratagems he will use. In my case, I had spent so much time on the study of the Chinese native religion, in order to acquaint myself with the forces I was to contend with in my work as a missionary, that unwittingly, I must confess now, I was fascinated by the weird beauty of the superstitious beliefs of your country. Like a medical doctor working on germs, but who has not taken adequate precautions against their noxious influence on his own health, I had my mind poisoned long before I fell under the spell of the aphorism in gilt characters on the tablet that night. Such being my weakness and such being my state of mind after I had been roused by the lamp, you will perhaps not be surprised to hear about my reactions to the more horrible visions which were to appear to me in quick succession while for a moment I became as helpless as an old superstitious Chinese peasant.
"All the time the lamp was moving toward me, leaving the demons benign or malignant and ideograms scarlet or golden again in the shade, until the light became oppressive to me, until I felt as if I were being pushed into a white-hot furnace. The lamp came directly toward my eyes and there it stayed for a few moments that seemed to me as long as eternity. Then I heard a voice, 'You foreign monk!' and I opened my eyes. The lamp was at last put aside, one or two feet away from me, and I saw the face of the new interrogator. I was shocked. It was a shock of recognition, for it seemed that I knew the face. But that was a dead man's face and that man had been dead for about twenty-five years. I blinked. Then I saw another man's face and that man had been dead for about fifty years.
"That these two men should appear in my vision at that hour was the last pull of the net. Not only these two faces, but bits of scenes and echoes of sounds associated with them all rushed back. Confusing and fragmentary as they were, as memories revived in a heated brain must be, they somehow all fell into place and composed a whole picture, or a sequence of pictures, vivid in detail and imbued with feeling, so that it seemed at that moment as if I were reliving the past, just as it is said that people on their deathbeds see their whole past lives re-enacted before their eyes. Such a vision may of course be either an illumination or a delusion. But I was led farther away from truth, for instead of admitting, like a good humble Christian, to the limitations of human knowledge, I presumed to have found in those mental pictures the meaning of my life. The past and the present seemed so closely related that I thought I had discovered for myself the law that governed them both. And that was the law of karma, the law of inexorable causality and inescapable retribution, which you Chinese call pao-ying. So the Communist inquisitor was none other than either of the two men who directly or indirectly had lost their lives because of me. If they were back now, their purpose was to settle accounts with me. Thus I became the forlorn wretch lost in a world where bloody debts must be repaid in blood, where charity or divine love was unheard of, where sins could never be expiated, where one must take up responsibility for whatever one had done.
"Now the first man in my vision was my kidnaper, whose life I had tried but failed to save; the second one was a Boxer whom I killed. The kidnaper had made a promise before he died. He said he would be back—was he back now?
"My kidnaping was actually a minor incident in a life which you might term full of vicissitudes, but at the time it happened it gave your government some trouble and created an international sensation. For immediately after my kidnaping had become known, my government sent strong protests to your government, demanding that prompt and effective measures' be taken to secure my release and to prevent the recurrence of similar incidents. My release was secured after the ransom was paid, but as a measure of prevention your government killed the leader of the kidnapers.
"I have been always sorry for that man's death. Not that his crime, legally speaking, did not deserve such a punishment, but he was also a nice fellow who might have been converted into a good citizen and Christian. I enjoyed my stay with him as his 'guest' in his hideout among the hills where I had been taken after he had stopped me, at the point of his gun, while traveling a hundred li from my church. I should say I received much better treatment from the bandits than from the Communists. For those ruffians were genuine materialists: they cared little about my 'ideology'; their interest was simply how much I was worth in terms of silver and gold. Instead of treating me as an enemy, they called me ts'ai-shen-yeh財神爺 (money god) or yang-ts'ai-shen (foreign money god). And that man had said that he would like to place me in a shrine and lay before me all the offerings they could afford that were due to a god if I only could bring them the sum of money they had asked. Though he sometimes would threaten to ‘tear me to pieces’ if the ransom should fail to come within a certain period of time, I could see he meant it only as a joke. For he believed all ‘foreign devils’ in China were mighty wealthy people and that my ‘folks at home’ would certainly be glad to part with ‘a tiny fraction of their fortune’ to see me set free.
“But my host, in his happy dreams, had never suspected that the money would be paid by his own government and that those gentlemen in Peking (the incident happened before your Generalissimo大元帥 launched his Northern Expedition) as well as the local military and police officers had made up their mind to have him caught and executed as due punishment for a crime that had caused everybody concerned so much embarrassment. In those years, you know, when the ‘face’ of a government was at stake, justice naturally became a matter of secondary importance. So, soon after my release, the strongly reinforced local garrison, having somehow or other located the ‘den’ of the bandits, started a campaign and captured every one of the dozen people responsible for my kidnaping. This, of course, I did not know until some time later.
“One day I was summoned before the colonel of the garrison. He said he had a man there whom he wanted me to identify. When that man was hustled in, in chains and swollen with bruises, I cried out, ‘Isn’t that Big Brother Wang?’—for that was how my kidnaper was called by his followers. ‘So that is our man,’ said the colonel, rather gleefully. ‘Do you want to say some prayers for him before he dies?’
“‘Do you mean to kill him? Oh, no! Big Brother Wang is a good man, he is only foolish. I would be glad to pay the bail, take him to my church and answer for his subsequent conduct.’
“‘I very much appreciate your benevolence, Shen-fu,’ said the colonel. ‘But as a soldier, I knew nothing but to obey my orders. But I don't think that man stands any chance of getting his pardon, though his followers may.’
“But the prisoner interrupted our conversation. ‘No more of your hypocrisy, you foreign monk!’ (So I was no more his ts'ai-shen.) ‘I let you sleep in my own bed and I fed you with big pieces of meat and the best wine I had fermented for myself. But I would rather have fed a dog than an informer like you. I let you go and you told everything to the soldiers. I trusted you like a friend and you have sold me. You are here to plead for my life, you double-dealing foreign devil! But I'll never trust you again. Let them chop my head off and my shoulders will only be relieved of a big burden. But I tell you I'll be back again as a man within twenty years. Save your breath now and spend it on me then, if you have twenty more years to live!'
"The officer promised, before I left, to dispatch in my name a petition to the governor. The next morning, however, the first thing I saw from my window was a bloody human head placed in a wooden cage nailed to the telegraph pole. Under it was a large placard, filled with characters in a lustrous black, heavily marked with lines and dots and little circles in red to punctuate as well as to emphasize the key passages, and bearing in the end the full weight of authority in the forms of three big square or rectangular seals in vermilion. Even from that distance, I could distinguish words and phrases like 'Wang,' 'kidnaper,' 'friendly nations,' 'entitled to protection,' 'to kill one man as an example to one hundred,' etc.
"So they had hoisted the head and the placard in front of my church is if to tell me that my wrong had been avenged and that my government should be satisfied now. But the man had died unrepentant and under the erroneous impression that I had been the informer. He should have known that with or without anybody to inform against him he could never have got away with his money since there was really a sort of net closing in on him and his gang of evildoers. Of course I have regretted that the man should have carried down to his grave the grudges he had thus borne me. But what I have felt most sorry for is that I could not save him. I had talked to him about repentance; I had tried to persuade him to let me go and not to take one cent of the ransom; I had offered him help if he would only try to be good. But the things he liked to hear from me were what food we ate, how we built such a tall building as our church, how many kinds of guns we generally used; in a word, he was interested in the life that the 'foreign devils' led, but the material side of life only. Perhaps, with the ransom in view he had had some plans of buying some foreign guns, building a big foreign house, and living like a foreign devil himself.
"But he had made a boastful promise that he would be back twenty years later. And here I could see he was seated, by the lamp, just as in those evenings when, after supper, over a game of cards, I would preach to him about the evils of material desire and the choice between God and Mammon. But he would stop my mouth with what he called his ‘discoveries about my private life’—a long list of monstrous vices that seemed to have a very strong appeal to his lurid imagination, debaucheries, atrocities, and practices of witchcraft commonly attributed to the robber-monks in Chinese dime novels, of which he was an insatiable reader. He said that he had found secret chambers in my church where beautiful naked women were kept; that I preserved my youth and virility by feeding on the fetuses taken from disemboweled women; that I held the souls of my parishioners in bondage by nailing their effigies on little chips of wood; that I sent little paper men in the night to rob the rich men one thousand li away and to remove their hoarded gold to my own cellar. But he would not expose me, fiend though I was, he would continue with a laugh—oh, no, since I was going to share the gold with him. What fantastic stories! How ridiculous!
“But those charges seemed again to be buzzing irritatingly around my ears, accompanied by the distant echoes of that man’s obscene laughter. Twenty-five years had passed since he died and he was back now. He had kept his promise, and the man seated before me, I could recognize, was his reincarnation. So thanks to my long life, I had the rare opportunity of meeting the same person in his two existences. The inquisitor—the kidnaper—which was he? They looked almost identical, but was I sure? For vague, elusive and shadowy, the man’s features looked rather like reflections in a cesspool糞池. Or as if they had belonged to a head hanging in the air, a head hoisted high against a gray morning sky. Then at once I saw blood all over that head and it was boxed in a cage. I blinked, and the cage was gone. The horrible face remained, but I knew it was somebody else’s—the Boxer’s. Just as I was sure the inquisitor was a reincarnation, I could see, too, that the kidnaper had been only the Boxer reincarnated. So three existences in one single life, fifty years of my personal history and your national history, were presented to my eyes all in one moment. But now I had come to the end of the cycle when hatred was to be appeased at last and debts long outstanding were to be repaid. The mystery of life was grasped in one wink of the eye and everything was solved. I was shocked but my mind was at peace—the kind of peace which is said to come only to those who have discovered the truth.
"I knew almost nothing about the Boxer as an individual; I had known him only as a member of the mob. For the Communists are not the only mob I have encountered. Fifty years before my arrest—as you well know, the year was 1900—our church in China was caught in another outburst of mass hatred known as the Boxer rebellion. The movement, suppressed at first by the local authorities but quickly expanded and gone rampant under the patronage of the Empress Dowager, was aimed at the destruction of us foreigners. The Boxers would seek and kill not only all the foreigners in China, but also the Chinese who had anything to do with us, the converts to the 'foreign religion' as well as traders dealing in foreign goods. When, twenty-five years later, the kidnapper showed such admiration for the foreign architecture and foreign-made guns, he had already made a great advance over the Boxers. For the Boxers would just burn the foreign building and look with contempt upon firearms, though gunpowder, I believe, was actually a Chinese contribution to the civilized world. They would match our guns and rifles with their swords and spears, or even with their muscles, for it was their belief that the human body, fortified by faith, could withstand any harm. So they would just run into the gun fire and meet their death. And as they fell, so also died their movement.
"But that movement had a special significance for me. I had just then been assigned to our mission in China as a novice and I found myself in a land where our work was not welcome. The air was already tense with hostility and sporadic incidents of violence occurred almost daily. When telegraph poles were cut down and railroads destroyed by the mob, it seemed that nothing smacking of Western civilization would be allowed to remain in the great Empire of China. I had luckily just slipped in, when China had made up her mind to close her door with a big bang. But I had to stay, and my work had to progress. So you can imagine the young novice with an adventurous bent of mind, fresh in your country, looking out in those exciting days, gun in hand, from the long narrow window in the thick stone wall to watch the movements of the enemy. He was thrilled by the prospect of literally defending his church as a soldier would defend his fortress. He knew that upon his vigilance and his Mauser毛瑟槍 would hang the lives of so many refugees who, believers and non-believers alike, peaceful citizens of many villages, had moved into the church for protection. The church was strongly built, with space enough to house all of them, and provisions had been made against a siege. He was stationed in the priest's study, the room in which he was to spend many hours reading and meditating during the later years when he himself became the priest. But then he was only there to stand ready for the enemy. But for many days he saw not an enemy, but only the vast green fields of sorghum spread out under the blue summer sky and huge masses of white cloud. Sometimes a fire and wreaths of dark smoke would rise on the horizon, and then he knew that another of his parishioners' houses was burning. But there was no sign of a battle. The sorghum covered miles and miles of land like a forest, monotonously green, mysteriously quiet, but its tall stalks and dense long leaves could well hide a whole regiment. Any day, any moment, the enemy might appear in force; then the peaceful sorghum fields would be bristling with arms and the defender might be caught unprepared. So for many vigilant hours, the youthful defender was keeping his watch over the sorghum fields and they became in his imagination a symbol of the people among whom he had just come to stay to prepare his work as their pastor: in appearance vast, simple, and peaceful, yet so dense as to be almost impenetrable, so unstable that they would rise and fall in big waves at the touch of a little breath of wind, and hostile and dangerous in the sense that the enemy was just lurking anywhere and you could never tell when he would jump at your throat.
"This, regrettably, was my first impression of your noble country, and as first impressions often do, it hardened into a prejudice, and I have ever afterwards been biased as regards your national character. I was always wondering, even after the Boxers were beaten back, with the help of firearms and at the cost of many human lives, whether hostility had really been removed from your hearts. For years our work went on peacefully, almost prosperously, so that sometimes I would say to myself that peace and good will had at last been established in your country. But such a complacent mood did not last long. I began painfully to witness the growth of a new enemy: Communism. Its threat became more and more real until it took over our church and I was kicked out of your door. That my missionary work should have begun with the Boxer Rebellion and ended at the hand of the Communists—was that a mere coincidence? That is why I was so often in spite of myself fascinated by the teachings of your ancient sages. Could what they said—that the world evolved only in a circle, that progress was an illusion, that everything would return to where it started—be all nonsense? But I believe I have found an answer to such a heresy. Since my life has been spared this time, perhaps there is still something left for me to accomplish. Can't I say now that I have been saved so that some day I can be sent back to your mainland and prove to the world that no frustrations and defeats will ever dishearten the faithful?
"Though I would often associate the Communists with the Boxers in my thoughts, the latter were a much less formidable enemy. They were the mob in its crudest form, with no discipline, no organization, no ideology, no strategy to speak of. They were only the inept, ignorant, primitive sort of fanatics. Fired with no less intense a hatred, they, however, had none of the Communists' subtlety and finesse, restraint and precision. As their name implies, they only strength was in their bare fist, while the Communists can either strike with their fist mailed, or stroke with a velvet paw. If they had anticipated some of the Communists' technique; if, for instance, they had worshiped Marx and Engels, instead of such story-book figures, discredited even then by your intellectuals, as the Old Dame of Mount Li梨山老母 and Sun Wu Kung the Monkey King; if they had evolved an economic theory and a cadre system; if they had been far-sighted enough and humble enough to learn from Western technology and Western science; if things had happened that way, those early fanatics might have won the day. They might have come to stay and our church would have been wiped out in China even fifty years ago. At least after what has lately happened on the Chinese mainland, I really doubt whether the Communists are not spiritual heirs to the Boxers. But being what they were, the Boxers alienated everybody's sympathy before they had achieved anything. They won a number of hearts among your rabble and bigots, but I wonder whether they ever won a single pitched battle. When at last they appeared from the sorghum fields, they were not nearly so dangerous as I had feared. They wrapped their heads in red bands and those gave them away immediately. They were about one hundred in number (for I could easily count the number of red knobs moving in the green fields), and we had about a dozen Mausers, pistols, and shotguns. But we stopped their advance by killing almost as many of them as emerged from the fields and came into the open within the range of our fire- arms. Against our well-planned defense, their foolhardy courage and their shining blades were of no avail. They fell down like so many red-headed insects before the spray of some poisonous powder.
"The smoke from our guns vanished into the blue sky; the dust raised by the advancing enemy settled back to the earth and the turmoil subsided. The Boxers, those that had survived, disappeared, while the sorghum fields looked as vast and calm as ever. On the yellow ground, along the fringes of the field, were scattered the dead and the wounded, lying in grotesque postures, their swords and spears gleaming. But groans could be heard. Some of them were kicking their legs.
"But of a sudden I heard a shout, while a sword flashed toward my eyes. It was too late to raise my gun. So I simply dodged the thrust, and grasped with one hand the arm that held the sword. I dragged the man toward me. For a moment we stood face to face, one inside, the other outside the window. It was a contest of strength, but he was giving ground until my big right hand reached his throat and I began to throttle him. The sword had dropped in the room at last and both of my hands were now applied to his neck. I saw how the man bulged his eyes and clenched his teeth. Then there was a crack and the man's neck was broken.
"That was the man I killed. Of all the Boxers, he was the cleverest. He knew how to take cover, to sneak, to attack by surprise. There were several trees and bushes that stood between the sorghum field and our church where he could have hidden himself. Then he had avoided notice by crawling along the base of the wall. And, what a wise man indeed, he did not wear the betraying red band! His death was different from that of his comrades too. He was killed not by a gun, but overpowered by sheer physical strength. I felt a moment of elation, for I had defeated the man at his own game. My muscles were stronger than his: I had proved to be a more powerful gladiator, or, for that matter, a better Boxer.
"That day I was not allowed to leave my post, so I could only bury the man the next day. His flesh, supposedly indestructible, was already stinking badly. I was somehow afraid to look at his face again but could not avoid it. I dragged him to the graveyard of our church, and threw him into the hole I had dug for him. I buried him together with all the ants that were devouring his body. The ants, I believe, must have found their way out again, or at least they must have been enjoying their new underground habitation so richly provided. But not the flies. For the man's body was strangely covered with sores, and the flies had been relishing them. I had never known that flies could be as tenacious as leeches, so when I shoveled back the earth into the hole, the flies, swarms of them, were buried alive. Nice company for the dead, I thought with a grim smile.
"Hung around the man's neck was a little red bag, inside which I found a piece of yellow paper. I had some friend of mine read the characters on it for me, for I had not yet started my lessons in Chinese. I found the inscription very interesting—but who could suspect that it contained a curse? I can recite it to you now and you will see why the votive tablet in the Jade Emperor's Temple fifty years later should have produced such a terrible effect on me:
Golden Light Holy Mother's Most Miraculous Body-Protection Amulet:
The Net of Heaven is cast over everything;
Both Good and Evil will get their deserts:
He that kills me shall perish;
But I shall rise from the dead.
Perhaps it was a mistake not to bury the amulet together with the body it was supposed to protect. Instead I kept it, as well as the sword the Boxer had dropped into my room, and those trophies became the first two items of my once-famous collection of Orientalia, which, of course, like everything else that might be said to be mine, has been taken over by the Communists.
"We buried all the dead; we held a Mass for the repose of their souls; we even erected crosses on their tombs. But I had never expected the Boxer, long buried, would reappear in the Communist court of interrogation. Now here he was, the same hideous person whom I once had held in my grip. But instead of my pulling him in, I felt he was pulling me out of the window. And my strength was failing. I was ready to let go my hold, ready to surrender everything—my fortress, my God, all the innocent refugees seeking shelter under my roof, my life, my faith, my calling, my vow—to the brutal force that had suddenly appeared in my window and that had proved to be more than I could resist. But when I was loosening my hand, I saw that the face before me was a dead man's face. It was not actually any man's face, but a mask, one of those masks used in Chinese drama. The mask was an image of Hate, of a hatred so deep, so impersonal, so abstract, that it would never lose its intensity in the course of time, nor would it ever be mollified by anything on the earth or beyond it.
"So I saw everything now. But I did not know when I had regained my voice. I said to the man or the face before me, 'Give me the paper. I will sign.' "
From Partisan Review, 1955, Vol. 22, No. 4.
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